Arteles Catalogue 2023-2020

Back to Basics program / JUNE 2022
So Mayer
UK
linktr.ee/somayer
About
In the introduction to UNREAL SEX, the 2021 collection of
short LGBTIQ+ erotic science fiction & fantasy that I co-edited
with Adam Zmith, I appear in the guise of a ghost librarian, a
happy phantom, narrating my finds from the etherial archive.
It was intended as playful but – as play often does – revealed
something profound about how and why I write, whether in
non-fiction modes as a scholar, critic, essayist and podcaster
with a particular focus on queer and feminist film and
literature, or across poetry, fiction and screenwriting, where
I am often making what I feel is missing, or erased, from the
archives, including my own personal archives, with a strong
attraction to speculative genres (which for me includes the
essay and poetry, as well as SFF). For me, writing is recovery
work in multiple senses and on multiple levels, a conduit
between self and world that is immersive and inciting, a
process of uncovering and regarding; above all, of listening.
betweensongs & contes
Arteles offered me a time and space of gathering: pulling
together work-in-progress from across a decade. What
felt like my failure and neglect was composted into a rich
archive of possibility. Fragments and first drafts of poetry,
fiction and personal essays that arrived carried in my head
and interleaved in notebooks, found a space to come out.
They were pinned to the walls, talked through in the kitchen,
walked to the lake, sweated in the sauna, and even – returning
to my body after a very long time – danced.
In practical terms, I found myself editing two poetry
manuscripts. The first brought two previous chapbooks
together with, and through the appearance of, a sequence
of 11 poems and two essays. ‘betweensongs’ is a highly
personal response to Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Written in the
liminal times of late and early light, it emerged in a cry of
grieving. Stunned, I was supported by other residents to find
ways to make the work survivable for myself, including a turn
to movement language, not to narrate but to keep safe. Its
protective circle also opened up the space to edit a decadelong
incremental poetry project called turning, and write its
final few poems of reconciliation, which feature Arteles in
various guises.
Arteles also showed up architecturally in an experimental
short story, or conte, part of a book project called Truth and
Dare. After three years of rewriting, ‘House of Change’ is
done. Its title describes what the residency gave me.